National Geographic, March, 1965
building.' This one is from Philadelphia," he
said, and pointed to the Albert Einstein Insti
tute of Physics. "Hydraulics is a 'Chicago
building'; others are gifts from Britain, Can
ada, South Africa, and Singapore."
A surprising number of girls attend this
college, most of them specializing in archi
tecture and chemistry. "Eight percent," Freed
man told me, "compared with 3 percent at
"He brought them out of darkness and the
shadow of death, and brake their bands in
sunder" (Psalms 107:14). Aged worshiper
reads a psalm of thanksgiving near King
David's Tomb. Other Jewish holy sites in Je
rusalem, including the famed Wailing Wall,
lie in Jordanian territory, forbidden to Jews.
M.I.T." And a woman heads the Technion's
building-research center.
On the roof of the physics institute stands
a station for cosmic-ray research. In the elec
trical engineering department I watched stu
dents building an electronic computer. And
at the hydraulics lab, Nate Freedman showed
me a complex model of the Yarqon River, as
well as newer, smaller models of two river
systems in western Nigeria.
"The Yarqon was one of our most critical
problems. The river was the key to irrigation
of the Negev. Our Yarqon model had to tell
us many things: How much water could be
diverted, where dams should be built, how
the water could be divided between settle
ments and agriculture."
I asked about the two Nigerian rivers.
"Many nations have shared their technical
know-how with Israel," Freedman said. "Now
we hope to prove that international aid can
be a two-way street. Those models will let
us share with one of the developing nations
of West Africa what we have learned on our
own Yarqon."
Soil Survives Under Jagged Stones
Moving north from Haifa on my 1959 trip,
I came to the Lebanese border. Here, within
200 yards of the frontier of an Arab nation,
a crew was busy clearing a hillside of jagged
limestone boulders.
"There is soil under these stones, as much
as three feet of it," foreman Simon Dahan
told me. "If it had not been for the stones,
rain would have washed away the earth cen
turies ago."
The workmen around me were new immi
grants from Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco.
Most had been in Israel only a few months.
Some of them would become members of this
moshav ovdim, or smallholders' cooperative
-at first as wage earners while they cleared
the fields, then as tillers of their own soil.
In a month, Dahan said, they would start
building houses, and water would be piped
from a reservoir a mile and a half away. A
school would rise. And contour plowing
would hold the hard-won fields. A stony and
disused hilltop would be transformed into a
village rich with life and hope.
I stood again on that windswept height in
1964. Around me, in the grayness of a soft
winter rain, I saw a settlement called Even
Menahem. Men whom I remembered pushing
boulders and leveling soil clustered around
me again, pointing out their houses and their
fields and the yellow school bus disgorging a
stream of their children.
Self-sufficiency has not yet come to Even
Menahem; that takes time. But already a few
chickens have gone to market from the wire
enclosures that stand behind nearly every
house in the settlement, and promisingly, the
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